Mexico: a conservative revolution

THE Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) had been in power for 71 years as the Revolutionary National party, the Party of the Mexican Revolution and then the Institutional Revolutionary party: Mexico had had enough. It was tired of corruption and repression and especially the way that crime went unpunished. The most obvious reason for Vicente Fox’s victory in 2000 was the discrediting of the governments of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo.

In 1991 and 1992 Salinas won over the people by his policy of modernism. But in 1994 he faced disaster: the Zapatistas rebelled and called him usurper to remind him that he had come to power fraudulently. The PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated, and Salinas blamed. Corruption was rampant. Salinas’s ex brother-in-law and PRI leader, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, was murdered, and Salinas’s brother Raúl, accused of being behind the murder, sentenced to 50 years’ imprisonment.

President Zedillo was responsible for bailing out, in unclear circumstances, the Fobaproa Bank, which cost Mexico more than $100bn. He advocated neoliberalism and was indifferent to the sacrifices of the working classes and decline of the middle class. The PRI contemplated the last vestiges of what used to be reliable levers of control: the Mexican Confederation of Workers, the Peasants’ Trade Union and the National Confederation of Popular Organisations. During previous elections, these had enabled the PRI to gain decisive votes. But this time, the creation of the Federal Electoral Institute guaranteed the opposition that its victory would be recognised.

In 1987 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of former president Lázaro Cárdenas, the hero of revolutionary nationalism, left the PRI after failing to win the internal elections for candidates and launched himself into an inequitable political struggle. Within a few months, he had mobilised the forces on the left and he probably won the 1988 elections. But his victory was not acknow (...)